I’m hopeless at record keeping. I start out with great willingness and before the week’s out I’ve lapsed severely. Earlier this year though I wanted to find out where all my time was going. I knew if I made my record-keeping in any way at all complex it just wouldn’t work for me. I decided to use Omni Outliner Pro (OO) to record a simple list of what I did each day, along with a column for an approximate duration and another column for estimating how much I’d earned (if relevant) in that timeslot.
This has actually worked out quite well for me, but last week whilst using this file as the basis for drawing up a client’s invoice I found a major drawback. I’d relied on OO’s numeric style to automatically number each day under a month heading. When I dragged that day to another document so as to group together work for one client and itemise my invoice it lost all date reference and became almost useless.
The document itself has worked well though, so I thought it would be better to specifically date each day. I’ve prepared an OO file for 2006 which lists each date in this format: [day number] – day number month year, and grouped by month, like this:
- January
- [001] – Sunday 1 January 2006 New Year’s Day
- [002] – Monday 2 January 2006
If this would be useful or interesting to you, you’re welcome to have a copy. Download: 2006.bz2. It’s a template file so drop it into your templates folder: ~/Library/Application Support/OmniOutliner 3/Templates. To use it go to the File menu in Omni Outliner and choose New from Template.
By the way: click the thumbnail of each screenshot for a larger version.
Trivia point: I’ve added in New Zealand’s pathetic offering of public holidays.
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